a free hand................

 

     In this petulant note—written in haste by an old man whose crankiness was exacerbated by a recent attack of kidney stones—we can sense the frustration that came from a lifetime spent battling those who viewed his profession with contempt.  In the face of the skeptics and scoffers, Michelangelo promoted a new conception of the artist, one in which the crass demands of commerce and the demeaning associations of manual labor have been sloughed off to reveal a creature as yet ill-defined but still thoroughly magnificent. . . .

     Michelangelo's determination to chart a new course embroiled him in endless quarrels as his claim of superiority clashed with his employers' own considerable egos.  While patrons tended to regard him and his colleagues as, at best, highly trained professionals tasked with carrying out their vision, Michelangelo insisted on an unprecedented degree of freedom to pursue his own vision, on his own terms.  Cardinal Cervini (soon to be elected Pope Marcellus II), in charge of overseeing the rebuilding of St. Peter's, was one of many who discovered how difficult it was to control the headstrong artist.  When he asked Michelangelo to inform him of his plans, the artist snapped; "I am not obligated, nor do I intend to be obliged to say either to your highness or to any other person what I am bound or desirous to do."  Even when his relationship with a patron was one of mutual respect, Michelangelo chafed at any restrictions placed on his freedom.  "If Your Holiness wishes me to accomplish anything," he wrote to Pope Clement VII, "I beg you not to have authorities set over me in my own trade, but to have faith in me and give me a free hand.  Your Holiness will see what I shall accomplish and the account I shall give of myself."

Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces

Michelangelo      Moses       c 1513-16     marble sculpture

The problem with AI ..........

 

.........................is its current untrustworthiness and error rate.  If a startup has some crazy glitch on an AI-generated web site, it probably is not that damaging but the stakes are much higher for established companies.  The problem in my mind boils down to the AI's lack of skepticism.

Everyone has heard of Descartes "I think therefore I am," but his actual logic was a bit different.  It can best be summarized as "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am."  The core of thinking for Descartes was doubt, or as I call it, skepticism.  By Descartes' definition, can AI be actually thinking without skepticism?

This isn't a problem limited to AI -- much of the human race seems to have lost the ability to be skeptical.  It seems everyone is really good at a knee-jerk skepticism of anything originating across the political aisle, but the capacity for skepticism for one's own work or for inputs that reinforce one's core beliefs is limited.

-Warren Meyer, from this Coyote Blog post

Chris Lynch's.................................

 

...................................daily dose of truth.

Yep......................

 

Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous. Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. We postpone joy, assuming there will always be more time. We don’t see the beauty in small moments.

-as cut-and-pasted from here

Living the good life........................

 

...................Kurt shows the way:

Active optimism...............

 

Always assume things will work out, then do the work to make it true. That combination creates a quiet confidence that allows you to tolerate uncertainty better than anything else.

-Sahil Bloom, from this newsletter

politics......................

The Democratic Party no longer has a knack for its business, which supposedly is politics. In America, this means cobbling together majority coalitions from a politically and culturally diverse continental nation. The second proposition is that the nation cannot have just one healthy party. When one welcomes contamination by the extremism and stupidity on its side of the spectrum, the other, relishing the collapse of standards, does likewise.

-George Will, as excerpted here

thinking about burnout.................

 

The old system said: “Obey.” The new system says: “Realize your potential,” which can be a much crueler thing because potential’s infinite, and people, last time I checked, are not. There’s no stopping point in an achievement society. “Potential” is the modern world’s term for whatever you haven’t done yet and, frankly, should already kinda feel bad about.

-Eric Barker, from this post

It's an art......................

 

It’s very difficult to be very lazy. It takes a lot of imagination to do nothing and you have to be sufficiently self-confident not to have a bad conscience. You have to have a taste for life, so that every minute is complete in itself and so you don’t have to keep saying ‘I’ve done this or that.’ You need strong nerves to do nothing. Being lazy also means that other people’s opinions don’t matter. Nor does the idea of always having to prove yourself.

-Françoise Sagan, as quoted here

the tidal wave of being..............

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.

-Jack London, The Call of the Wild

reciprocation................

 

     I explained to him something we at Echelon Front call the "reciprocal nature of leadership," which put simple means that what you give, you get in return.  When you show that your care for your people, they reciprocate; they care in return.  When you listen to your people, they listen in return.  When you treat your people with respect, that respect is returned.  And so on.

-Dave Berke, The Need to Lead

anti-fragile.............

 

The Harvard Grant Study followed subjects for 80 years and found that participants who chose comfort over challenge aged faster, died sooner, and reported less life satisfaction.

We are anti-fragile systems.  We require stress to maintain basic functions.  Remove all challenge and we literally decompose.

-Stan Taylor

In the background.....................

 

Lynyrd Skynyrd.................Simple Man

Mama told me when I was young
Come sit beside me, my only son
And listen closely to what I say.
And if you do this
It will help you some sunny day.
Take your time... Don't live too fast,
Troubles will come and they will pass.
Go find a woman and you'll find love,
And don't forget son,
There is someone up above.

And be a simple kind of man.
Be something you love and understand.
Be a simple kind of man.
Won't you do this for me son,
If you can?

Forget your lust for the rich man's gold
All that you need is in your soul,
And you can do this if you try.
All that I want for you my son,
Is to be satisfied.

And be a simple kind of man.
Be something you love and understand.
Be a simple kind of man.
Won't you do this for me son,
If you can?

Boy, don't you worry... you'll find yourself.
Follow your heart and nothing else.
And you can do this if you try.
All I want for you my son,
Is to be satisfied.

And be a simple kind of man.
Be something you love and understand.
Be a simple kind of man.
Won't you do this for me son,
If you can?

maps......................

 

Opening it one night in my house, an ordinance survey map of Connemara made little sense to Martin.  Mostly, it was what was isn't in it that he had an eye for.  Refolding it, he handed it back to me saying, "What chance have we when that's where we think we live."

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

Monet......................

 

Claude Monet   1874   Sunset on the Seine    Oil on Canvas

The Art & Artists blog gifted us a 27-part series on the wondrous works of Claude Monet.  Do take advantage of it.

precedented............................

 

            via

continuous judgment..........

 

The skill can’t be ‘learn the fixed answer,’ because there is no fixed answer. The skill has to be continuous judgment.

Speed matters, but speed without judgment is just fast failure.

-Nicholas Bate, from here

Let's keep it simple...................

 

........................................just call me flag.

Be careful what you wish for...........

We nationalized risk, socialized failure, taxed boldness, and administered everything else. Result: a magnificent country that builds nothing anymore, that manages its decay with a funereal elegance, and where the most gifted young person dreams of only one thing—leaving.

Freedom doesn't die assassinated. It dies anesthetized, to applause.

-as culled from here

The process...............

 Why is improvement hard?

Part of the issue is everyone wants to improve, but nobody wants to destroy. Change often requires destruction. Or, at least, unlearning.

Let's call it gentle elimination. You may have to leave little habits, update current beliefs, eliminate comfortable patterns. When you want better outcomes, your daily norms may need to change. The process of improvement is not just about adding things you like.
Sometimes habits and patterns belong to who you were, not who you are trying to be. If you'd like something better, then a routine you are comfortable with may have to die.

-James Clear, from today's effort

Opening paragraphs................

 

      Selfmade men always do a lopsided job of it, and the sheriff had come out conspicuously short on the capacity to sympathize with anyone but himself.  No doubt ears still were burning at the Fort Peck end of the telephone connection; he'd had to tell that overgrown sap of an undersheriff he didn't give a good goddamn what the night foreman said about dangerous, get the thing fished out of the river if it meant using every last piece of equipment at the dam site.  This was what he was up against all the time, the sheriff commiserated with himself during the drive from Glascow now, toward dawn.  People never behaving on bit better than they could get away with.

-Ivan Doig, Bucking the Sun

the formula...................

 

At the Sun Valley Conference a number of years ago, Jeff Bezos told the story about asking Warren Buffett for advice on a phone call.  It went like this:

     Bezos:  "If you're the second richest guy in the world and your investment thesis is so simple, why isn't everyone just copying you?"

     Buffett:  "Because no one wants to get rich slow."

     There is no formula for getting rich in a hurry.  It's pure luck or timing.  But there is a formula for building wealth slowly.  You have to live below your means, have a healthy savings rate, regularly invest your money into risk assets and then wait.

-Ben Carlson, Risk & Reward

Giving it all away...............

 

Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity.  But this means we then give away our power to that entity, be it "fate" or "society" or the government or the corporation or our boss.  It is for this reason that Erich Fromm so aptly titled his study of Nazism and authoritarianism Escape from Freedom.  In attempting to avoid the pain of responsibility, millions and even billions daily attempt to escape from freedom.

-M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Sixty years ago...................

 

      The Beatles....................We Can Work It Out

       

To counter.......................

 

.......................................perfectionism:

1. Mistakes don’t make you a failure. They make you a learner.

2. Achievements are not a symbol of your worth. They’re a snapshot of your performance.

3. Beating yourself up doesn’t make you stronger; it leaves you bruised. Don’t say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t say to a good friend.

4. It’s impossible to please everyone. Decide whose opinion matters to you—and whose doesn’t.

5. Character is not revealed by how many setbacks you face. It’s forged by how you face them.

6. People gauge your competence mostly by your hits, not your misses.

7. The objective is not to be the best; it’s to get better. The person you’re competing with is your past self, and the bar you’re setting is for your future self.

8. Our biggest regrets aren’t actions—they’re inactions. Don’t set yourself up to wish you’d taken more chances.

9. Healthy goals include two targets: an aspirational result and an acceptable outcome. If you fall anywhere between them, you haven’t failed.

10. Success is not a straight line. It’s a squiggly line.

The mystification (and pride)..................

 

.....................................of being out of the loop.

atmosphere...................

 

Claude Monet      +/-1863    Sunset over the Sea 

For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the air and the light which vary continually. For me, it is only the, surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.

-Claude Monet

On being careful about...................

 

..................................what you wish for.

Eric Barker........................

 

.............................weighs in on self-sabotage:

Žižek says we aren’t unified. We’re not transparent to ourselves. We say one thing, do another, and then rationalize like crazy. We don’t just fail to know ourselves. We actively collaborate in not knowing ourselves. This isn’t the kind of thing you want to hear from a man who looks like he resides in a storm drain.
But we don’t need more false reassurance. We need a brilliant lunatic to point at the machinery of our lives and say: “You see, that part there? (sniffs, rubs nose) This thing you think is normal? That’s where the madness lives.”
And this is why Slavoj Žižek is our most helpful ally against self-sabotage.

war and peace.................

 

The most sophisticated villain creation happens in your own head.  You split yourself into parts and declare war.  The disciplined self fights the lazy self.  The ambitious self quarrels with the comfortable self.  The good self goes to war with the bad self.

This internal villainization feels productive because you're fighting your demons and conquering weakness.  You declare war on procrastination, make it the enemy, and fight it with willpower and discipline.  It fights back by getting stronger.  The harder you battle, the more energy you feed it.  Your resistance becomes its fuel.

Every internal villain follows the same pattern.  The more you fight anxiety, the more anxious you become about being anxious.  The more you battle negative thoughts, the more mental energy you spend thinking negative thoughts.  The more you battle against your body, the more your body wars against you. . . .

The solution is integration and understanding that your procrastination is trying to protect yourself from judgment, your anxiety is trying to keep you safe, and your comfortable self is trying to preserve energy for survival.

They are merely parts of you serving outdated functions.  Fighting them creates internal civil war, but understanding them creates internal peace.  The issue is peace doesn't provide the same chemical hit as war, so most people keep fighting themselves until they die.

-Stan Taylor, The Black Book of Power

Being honest about...................

 

.................................self-chosen distractions.

Michael has been thinking about this subject for a long while.  To wit:

Abstract expressionism.........

 

Jasper Johns    1961      0 Through 9      oil on canvas

It's simple........................

 

It's simple, you just take something, and then you do something to it, and then you do something else to it.  Keep doing this and pretty soon you've got something.

-attributed to Jasper Johns

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.

-attributed to Tom Peters

The meme wars continue...........

 

          more whimsy here

We will be testing his theory......

 

    We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism's physical adaptive systems and its decision-making processes.  Put more simply, future shock is the human response to overstimulation.

------------------------------

Change is not merely necessary to life; it is life. By the same token, life is adaptation.

     There are, however, limits on adaptability. When we alter our life style, when we make and break relationships with things, places or people, when we move restlessly through the organizational geography of society, when we learn new information and ideas, we adapt; we live. Yet there are finite boundaries; we are not infinitely resilient. Each orientation response, each adaptive reaction exacts a price, wearing down the body's machinery bit by minute bit, until perceptible tissue damage results.

     Thus man remains in the end what he started as in the beginning: a biosystem with a limited capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the consequence is future shock.

-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970)

Never...................

 

Guard your speech.  Never speak of yourself, your affairs, or of anything else in a discouraged or discouraging way.  Never admit the possibility of failure, or speak in a way that infers failure as a possibility.  Never speak of the times as being hard, or of business conditions being doubtful.  Times may be hard and business conditions doubtful for those who are on the competitive plane, but they can never be for you; you can create what you want, and you are above fear.  When others are having hard times and poor business, you will find your greatest opportunities.

Train yourself to think of and to look upon the world as something which is Becoming, which is growing; and to regard seeming evil as being only that which is undeveloped.  Always speak in terms of advancement; to do otherwise us to deny your faith, and to deny your faith is to lose it.  Never allow yourself to feel disappointed.  You may expect to have a certain thing at a certain time, and not get it at that time; and this will appear to you like failure.  But if you hold to your faith you will find that the failure is only apparent.  Go on in the certain way, and if you do not receive that thing, you will receive something so much better that you will see that the seeming failure was really a great success.

-Wallace D. Wattles, The Science of Getting Rich

Please.........................

 

America may have a sick political system and an economy that does not work well for many, but it is distinctly different, and in many ways better than its prime competitors. Our legacy, and our future, lies in large part in preserving that system without falling into the trap of centralized autocracy.

-Joel Kotkin, from this edition

insourcing......................

 

Because the hard part of writing—the part where you wrestle with what you actually believe—that’s still 100% human.

And if you try to cheat that, you might still publish something…

But it won’t be yours.

-Mark Manson, as cut-and-pasted from here

And I'm damned glad to be here.......

 

It’s a George Gershwin, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Estevan Ochoa, Saul Bellow, Elon Musk, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland, Ulysses S. Grant, Cochise, Ted Williams, Dorothy Parker, Rod Serling, Jimmy Stewart, Carl Sandburg, and Wyatt Earp sort of place . . .

 -Michael Wade, from here

courage...........................

 

Your first attempt might not be very good, but nobody's early work is good. There will always be a gap between where you are and where you want to be. And the bridge between that gap is courage. The courage to look foolish in the beginning. The courage to show up again when your early work is criticized. The courage to look yourself in the mirror and say, "I realize I'm not good enough yet, but the only way to get better is to keep working on it."

-James Clear, from this episode

stress.....................

 

You've been so focused on the loss of external things that you failed to account for the ongoing loss of internal things.  And unlike money or jobs, time and integrity don't regenerate once spent.  Every day you live disingenuously is a day of your life burnt.  How many more are you willing to torch? . . .

In health terms, chronic stress is deadly when it wrecks your immune system, heart, and brain.  So, keeping the peace externally might be killing you slowly, whereas a short burst of conflict, followed by a freer life, could literally improve your health.  Your contract could be cutting years off your life by keeping you under constant stress.  Loss aversion made you avoid short-term pain as the cost of long-term well-being.  A bad trade.

-Stan Taylor, The Black Book of Power

In the background..........................

 

..............................The American Flyer album

Leading....................

 

     Leadership isn't a burden—it is an opportunity and obligation.  It affords us power and influence and, as much as is possible, control.  It gives us what we all want most—freedom.  We gain freedom to make decisions, and to determine in every way possible the outcomes of our lives.  Leadership prevents us from being victims.  It's how we mitigate the risks caused by external forces and pressures.  It's how we avoid lying face down in the dirt waiting to die. It's how we win.

     On that day in Iraq, I was lucky.  But relying on luck or hoping circumstances will change on their own is not a good business plan, not a solid approach to leading a team.  And it's definitely not a good way to build a marriage or raise a family.  Your luck will run out at some point, and you will end up a victim to your situation.  The check engine light in your car won't go off on its own—you have to do something to fix it.  The same is true everywhere.  You need a strategy, some plan of action, when the external threats arise.  You need to be leading through each aspect of life,

     So, lead in every situation, under every circumstance, no matter how mild or severe or routine a problem appears.  Don't wait, don't sit back, don't assume you have no course of action and become a victim of the world around you.  Lead.

-Dave Berke, The Need to Lead: A TOPGUN Instructor's Lessons on How Leadership Solves Every Challenge

focus on creation.......................

 

     Debates over wealth differentials and inequality are important for every society as we seek to reduce poverty and guarantee opportunity for all citizens.  Yet capitalism is much like what Winston Churchill said of democracy: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."  Capitalism does produce wealth inequalities but has also proven to be the most successful system at wealth creation and opportunity in history.  The focus should not be on wealth concentration alone but economic and social barriers to wealth creation.

-Jonathan Turley, Rage and The Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution

As experiments go................

 

     How Tocqueville settled on this plan is unclear, but there was a widespread sense in Restoration intellectual circles that the Old World could learn from the grand American "experiment" of democratic governance.  George Washington was revered in France as a virtuous general who lived humbly, fought only when necessary, and relinquished his power at the end of his term—a kind of anti-Napoleon.  Nobody drew the contrast better than Chateaubriand in his Voyage en Amerique, published in 1827 and widely excerpted in the French press.  "Washington and Buonaparte both emerged from the republic's bosom; both were the children of freedom," Chateaubriand remarked but added, "Washington remained loyal to freedom, but Buonaparte betrayed it.

-Olivier Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville

maybe.................

 

     She stepped outside, wondering whether a life could really be judged from just a few minutes after midnight on a Tuesday.  Or maybe that was all you needed.

-Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

On being you-ish.............

 

Your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be. Your path, your character, your life, should be the most unlikely, the most unexpected, the least predictable version you can make. Improbable lives have fewer competitors, more unique rewards, and are harder to replace with AIs, since AIs run on the predictable. . . .

The more you-ish you become, the less competition you have, because you are occupying your own niche. Less competition means you don’t have to be in a race; you can relax and focus on your strengths. You have the space to become even more you, and even less likely.

-Kevin Kelly, from this substack

And fairly rare, too.................

 

It’s easy to make any case, no matter how absurd, by misrepresenting reality and hoping that your audience won’t notice – that is, by resorting to unfair intellectual practices. It’s a bit more difficult, yet vastly more productive – and honorable – to actually consult and report the data even when they fail to tell the tale that you wish to be told.

-Donald J. Boudreaux, from this post

In the background.........................

 

McGuffey Lane.........................the First Album

Asking important questions..........

 

How Much Has the U.S. Government Borrowed to Pay Back What It Owes Itself?

-deficits matter if you plan on living past 2033

Interesting................

 

..............Us boomers are now outnumbered by our kids.  Back story is here.

the submicroscopic............

 

The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamily self-aware, the submicroscopic moments...

-Don DeLillo, from here

writing.....................

 

If you have any doubt, default to writing. It scales better, respects people’s time, and produces better thinking. Writing forces you to define the problem and to admit whether calling the meeting was simply delaying the decision.

-Nicholas Bate, from here

cultivating..........................

 

Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning — the confusion of instruction and education.  We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind.

-from this master cultivator

On beauty........

 

This is why beauty, even today, especially today, cannot serve any party; it cannot serve, in the long or short run, anything but men's suffering or their liberty.  The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains free-lance.  The lesson he then finds in beauty, if he draws it fairly, is a lesson not of selfishness but rather of hard brotherhood.  Looked upon thus, beauty has never enslaved anyone.  And for thousands of years, every day, at every seond, it has instead assuaged the servitude of millions of men and, occasionally, liberated some of them once and for all.

-Albert Camus, from his 1957 lecture "Create Dangerously"

time to fly......................

 

"Are you happy here?"

I looked out of the window and took a breath.  I couldn't lie to him.

"I'm happy here, but I also want to grow more.  I want more things for myself.  I am trying to sort it all out.

Then we were silent.

A few days later, he asked me to meet him at the office on the following Saturday morning.  As soon as I walked in the door and saw his face, I knew what was coming.

"This is going to be the best thing that ever happened to you," he began.  He fired me, then said, "It's time for you to fly."

After six years at the 55 Restaurant Group, I walked out of that office for the last time.

-Cameron Mitchell, Yes Is the Answer.  What Is the Question?:  How Faith in People and a Culture of Hospitality Built a Modern American Restaurant Company

facility..........................

 

The facility with which people bore the hardships of others was amazing.

-Louis L'Amour,  Shalako

Any Major Dude With Half a Heart...........

 

.................celebrates the World Cup by offering 48 songs, one from each of the countries playing in the on-going tournament.

Spinning actuarial science...................

 

.......................................I'll drink to that.

Might quicken me.................

 

Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.

Alive and violated,
They lay on their bed of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege

And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

-Seamus Heaney, "Oysters"

patience...................

 

Youth walked before me and I followed him until we came to a distant field.  There he stopped, and gazed at the clouds that drifted over the horizon like a flock of white lambs.  Then he looked at the trees whose naked branches pointed toward the sky as if praying to Heaven for the return of their foliage.

     And I said, "Where are we now, Youth?

     And he replied, "We are in the field of Bewilderment.  Take heed."

     And I said, "Let us go back at once, for this desolate place affrights me, and the sight of the clouds and the naked trees saddens me."

     And he replied, "Be patient.  Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge."

-Kahlil Gibran, The Voice of The Master

It is what we allow it to be...............

 

      Although we cannot dictate all the circumstances around us, there is no excuse for being unprepared or irresponsible.  All too often we disregard our ability to influence the outcome because we see a situation as beyond our control.  We casually dismiss our responsibility with the refrain, "It is what it is."

     We need to lead.  Even when circumstances feel completely beyond our control, we must still act.  Only then will we be positioned to exert our influence, which will drive us closer to determining the outcome.  By leading, we can overcome the feeling of victimization and, instead, understand the range of options within our power.

     By taking control of our preparation, reaction, and response to problems, we become leaders.  When we reframe our mindset and see situations through the lens of leadership, we understand that things don't have to remain as they are.

-Dave Berke, The Need to Lead: A TOPGUN Instructor's Lessons on How Leadership Solves Every Challenge

Despite the odds..............

 

...................Viewed purely through the lens of probability, many of humanity’s greatest achievements look irrational.

Fifty ways...........................

 

.................................................to live deeply.

It is not to late...........................

 

............................................to celebrate.

On pizza.................

 

....................................and leadership.

memories.....................

 

The truth is that memory and forgetting are forever entwined. . . .

     Neurobiologists learn a great deal about memory by studying forgetting.  To forget something means we had to have known it at some point, and that's different than never having known it in the first place.  And even when we think we know something, memory is fallible in two different ways.  First, we can lose things in our memory banks, sometimes temporarily, sometimes for a lifetime.  Second, when we do locate and retrieve a memory, it can be fantastically distorted without our realizing it.

     The truth is we have false memories every day, lots of them.  We just don't know it because we're not often challenged.

-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord:  Music as Medicine

ought to be adjusted.................

 

Throughout, however, Burke demonstrates his ability to combine specific details with Olympian generalization.  Thus a discussion of imports from Jamica and the malign effects of the Stamp Act yields the timeless Burkean insight that 'politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.'

-Jesse Norman, Edmund Burke: The First Conservative

how long is an era...................?

 

     An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era.  As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interesting era.  In any case, our era forces us to take an interest in it.  The writers of today know this.  If they speak up, they are criticized and attacked.  If they become modest and keep silent, they are vociferously blamed for their silence.

-Albert Camus, from his 1957 lecture at the University of Uppsala

thoroughly.................

 

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and the like.

-George Bernard Shaw, from here